The Sayings

Not too long ago, someone in the Integral community commented on the part of my biography in which I described communications with angels and other spiritual beings. She said, watch out! That’s the intermediate zone, and it’s dangerous.

She was referring to Sri Aurobindo’s well known caution regarding the stages in the spiritual life known to Integral theory as the para-mind (Indigo) and meta-mind (Violet). Wikipedia summarizes Aurobindo’s teaching like so:

Aurobindo asserted that spiritual aspirants may pass through an intermediate zone where experiences of force, inspiration, illumination, light, joy, expansion, power, and freedom from normal limits are possible. These can become associated with personal aspirations, ambitions, notions of spiritual fulfilment and yogic siddhi, and even be falsely interpreted as full spiritual realisation. One can pass through this zone, and the associated spiritual dangers, without harm by perceiving its real nature, and seeing through the misleading experiences. Those who go astray in it may end in a spiritual disaster, or may remain stuck there and adopt some half-truth as the whole truth, or become an instrument of lesser powers of these transitional planes. According to Aurobindo, this happens to many sadhaks and yogis.

About this, I have a few points to make briefly now, and then I’ll be describing the relationship of Integral Magic to Aurobindo’s philosophy in more detail at a later date.

One. I agree completely with all the associated spiritual dangers of these stages of consciousness, and have experienced some of them myself. These include the Dark Night of the Soul phenomena as it is known to Christian mystics. Aurobindo is completely correct, so far as he goes.

Two. Aurobindo’s map of the higher realms of consciousness are, in fact, largely a product of his insights and realizations AT PRECISELY THESE STAGES IN “THE INTERMEDIATE ZONE”. Yes, Aurobindo had many important things to say which arose from the places he calls “full spiritual realisation”, but the essential evolutionary thrust of his teaching can be seen as an attempt to create maps useful to others to help them to navigate these stages, activity rooted at the lessons of the meta-mind which is part of the so-called “Intermediate Zone”.

Three. There are much, much bigger problems than some spiritual seekers spending too much time talking to angels or spirits or doing other sorts of psychic mediumship and integrative map-making. The most obvious bigger problem is that people aren’t doing ENOUGH of that sort of thing; they are getting stuck in the first-tier or second-tier and never passing through the turmoil that accompanies the so-called Intermediate Zone. A less obvious problem is that folks who think they have passed the Intermediate Zone — perhaps even Sri Aurobindo himself arguably — have “spiritually bypassed” a great deal of the work in the collective consciousness and collective unconsciousness that needs to happen for the health and welfare of our world. Considering the blandness and unoriginality and even banality of much of the teaching of today’s spiritual teachers who focus on the easy-peasy “oneness teachings” that are supposed to rocket the average Joe or Jane into “nondual enlightenment”, spiritual bypassing of the subtle realms is probably a much bigger problem than psychics or integrative map-makers who are wallowing in “half-truths”.

Unfortunately, Sri Aurobindo didn’t resolve all of the challenges of these stages in a way that is useful and necessary for the 21st century, so he didn’t exhaust the need for spiritual explorers to venture into the psychic and subtle realms. It’s no fault of his own that he didn’t solve all the map-making problems relevant to Integralists in the Third Millennium. He did a fantastic job given his time and place in history, and it is upon his shoulders that Integralists stand.

In conclusion, yes, there are in fact dangers in the so-called Intermediate Zone. But these are dangers that more people, the Magicians and Gnostics and Alchemists of the Meta-Mind and the Spiritual Warriors and Heroes and Wheeler Dealers of the Audi-Mind need to step into and face. As we collectively navigate the Third Tier we need to bring back better integrative maps and other spiritual technologies and gift them to the world to make journeys less perilous for the mystics to come.

Given the pivotal time we live in, the greater dangers lie in refusing the difficult spiritual work on the road to Atman and the Uni-Mind/Una-Mind (Supermind). Aurobindo’s priorities were necessarily different than ours, so we need to exercise careful discernment for ourselves and trust others to know when enough is enough, unless of course they ask for our advice.

I’ve decided to move up the delivery date on The Kalendar and delay the delivery date on Lingua-U, so now both books are slated for virtually simultaneous release in the Spring/Summer of 2018. Since each Kalendar date is based on a station of Lingua-U, these two projects are intimately linked. My goal is to give book reviewers and fans the opportunity to evaluate the whole of the project as it stands in Spring/Summer 2018 with completed texts from both books.

The Kalendar book is being “live blogged”, so accelerating its release means that you will now begin to see more than one new blog post from me on some days. One new blog post will apply to the current calendar date, but others will describe other dates spread throughout the year. I will also eventually begin to edit my old Kalendar blog posts to tidy them up for the book, but will not be pushing through notifications of post updates, even if the post is substantially rewritten. My goal is that by the time of the book’s release it will be substantially identical to the contents on the Kalendar web site.

I have also begun preparations for offering the first instruction in Lingua-U beginning in Autumn 2018. Stay tuned for details, and be sure to join my mailing list if you don’t want to miss announcements for future courses.

The First Tier and the Second Tier of consciousness are described in The Kalendar as six Squares, each of which is divided into nine panels, called Thrones. Sound familiar? This is a way of talking about the Rubik’s cube, which could be used as a magical object for contemplating the mysteries of The Kalendar.

Although the Third Tier cannot be depicted in a 3-dimensional puzzle of any design that I know, you can think about it as the solution which unifies the opposites (above)

Blue* … The Union of Black and White
Violet* … The Union of Red and Green
Silver* … The Union of Brown and Gold

Pretty cool, huh? This is a great example of the way that the Integral Magic system is able to make use of common objects for spiritual contemplation, with the manipulation of the object taking on new potential significance for the follower of the Magical path.

Once the essential texts of Integral Magic are published, there are many opportunities to complement them with a suite of magical objects. The objects will help to make it faster and easier and more fun to learn Lingua-U and The Kalendar, and put them into practice in an Integral Life Practice.

* Note: These colors do NOT correspond to the AQAL colors … or the Spiral Dynamics colors either. There are good reasons, but that is a topic for another day. Here are the correspondences:

A magical reading of a text is similar to a metaphorical or allegorical reading in that it intends a non-literal interpretation that is nevertheless rich in meaning and importance. Whereas a metaphor employs a figure of speech which is symbolic of something else and so it does not apply to all words in a text, magic is a sort of additive meaning which looks for meaning and significance in the sounds and letter-shapes of words that goes beyond their intent. Magic offers a sort of allegorical reading of a text in which ALL words can be interpreted as having a hidden meaning revealed by the contents of the magical system.

In Lingua-U, those hidden meanings are the ŋʊŋon (“fables” etymologically borrowed from Vietnamese, pronounced NG-OO-NG-OHN) told by the words when they are translated into the metalanguage’s system of subtle energy marks and metagrammatical relationships. For instance, the word Magician is spelled, to six marks, as 𝌽⚏. Once the word is so translated into a Lingua-U metaword, ŋʊŋon such as these arise:

Magician is the Yin Master at the Seat of Concern at the Throne of Meaning.

Its Yin-Yin energy responds to the Yang-Yang energy of Meditation at Meaning’s Throne and culminates in the Yung-Yung energy of More or Mourning or Morir (To Die).

Magician is identical to the words Must and Muscle and Mush to six marks of subtle energy (and identical to Much to seven marks).

Measured to six marks, the word Magician is 32% Yang, 49% Yin, and 19% Yung energy.

Magic enables the creation of ŋʊŋon which are like myths about the hidden meaning of language. Ŋʊŋon must be consistent with the structures and teachings of the magical system. They cannot be made up willy-nilly, but must be linguistically and numerologically “correct” within the magical Konstruct.

According to the teachings of Lingua-U, the creative process of making new ŋʊŋon is an important developmental achievement within the Meta-Mind (or Violet altitude), providing a Yung-Yung resolution to the problem of inexactness at the Throne of Ambiguity at the Letter of Amplification (a sort of rite of passage in the Third Act of the 7th-person-perspective). In short, at a certain structure of its development, the mind develops a sort of comprehensive language awareness that “goes beyond” the alphabets and numbers themselves, alive and creative with the hidden meanings of the common energetic patterns in common behind numbers, letters, and all other symbols. These esoteric truths are pragmatically useful for making and improving maps of human nature, understanding philosophical matters, and interpreting sacred or divinely revealed prophetic words.

In short, a magical reading of a text looks at metatheoretical or metaphorical language FROM THE INSIDE OUT. This is hardly surprising when you consider that, according to Lingua-U, Magician at 𝌽⚏ is The Inside Zone, or Hermeneutics, of Yin, Manifestation, at the Individual Subjective Quadrant, including much of Introspection and Spirituality, of the 7th-Person Perspective, concerning highly complex cognition.

Well, if the meta-calendar we are talking about is The Kalendar, which is intimately linked to the philosophy of integralism and the metalanguage of Lingua-U, I’ve got nine answers for you, one for each of the Nine Stations. To say it another way, it depends on the central concerns of your Station of Spirit.

Station One — Use the magical metacalendar to increase the efficacy of mantras, spells, Axis Mundi rituals, and magical formulas by synchronizing their expressions with a robust vision of sacred time and space.

Station Two — Use the sacred metacalendar to appreciate interfaith and interreligious sacred holidays and weave them together into a new narrative about Spirit’s actions in history, manifest in each of the Great Traditions.

Station Three — Use the secular metacalendar to restructure the secular working calendar, expanding the length of weekends and holidays to give workers more work/life balance in industrial economies.

Station Four — Use the spiritual metacalendar to create a map of psychological states as well as mythological Archetypes, and map the interconnections between them for a more comprehensive psychology; also, reform educational systems through radically interdisciplinary teachings of art, philosophy, history, language, mathematics, martial arts, and holistic wellness.

Station Five — Use the integral metacalendar to align all the Kosmic Addresses of the AQAL Map to calendar coordinates to enable the use of The Kalendar as an Integral Life Practice. Through Kosmic Address Presencing (KAP) protocols involving new mantras and visualization exercises, supercharge your capacity to embody First Tier, Second Tier, and Third Tier more fully; enhance theories of governance by making them more comprehensive and holistic.

Station Six — Use the paramind metacalendar as a psychic oracle, not unlike a Ouiji board, for communicating with angelic beings, channeling spirits, or divining the mysteries of the Tai Hsuan Ching divination text; open up new possibilities for interspecies communication.

Station Seven — Use the metamind metacalendar to enhance learning of Lingua-U or other metamind technologies such as the New Atlas for extending the cognitive reach of the mind to new realms of subtle manifestation; update and integrate Kabbalah and other esoteric traditions with a more sophisticated phonosemantic philosophy; reformulate astrology in harmony with astrophysics as well as the New Map of the Archetypes; update and enhance Enneagram spiritual typologies; freshen nonduality philosophies.

Station Eight — Use the audimind metacalendar to enhance holistic healing modalities by tapping into new potentialities for wellness by aligning with natural cosmic energies; develop an updated ethos of the Spiritual Warrior for our time; advance scientific and transcientific understandings of prediction and control of natural phenomena.

Station Nine — Use the unimind metacalendar for enhancing enjoyment and loving relationships in ordinary life, a new integral yoga and new t’ai ch’i, religious reform movements, update the source code of enlightenment teachings, and renew systems of global and interplanetary governance.

So if you’ve been wondering: what good is a new calendar?, then here is your answer. It’s a little of all of the above, plus applications I haven’t even thought of. The most interesting question of all is: what will YOU do with a metacalendar?

Once the Lingua-U book (now called Lingua-U, Vol. I: The Unitive Metalanguage) is out, and once The Kalendar blog finishes its 365th daily post, I’m thinking of doing a humorous YouTube video series called “Joe Perez Spoils Language”.

It’s going to be hard for anyone to go back to using language naive of the relationships of its subtle energetic components. What name do you give for anything anymore? Oneness? Geist? Zeitgeist? Spirit? God? All-in-All? All-That-Is? Allah? Unity? Universe? Kosmos? Kronos?

Really there are only about three or four really good names that aren’t spoiled for the overarching framework that encompasses all the other stations in Lingua-U. The rest are probably spoiled forever, for reasons you will soon discover for yourself. They aren’t ruined as great words within their own Stations, but they really aren’t suitable as a term that can unify the Sacred Words of all the religions and philosophies. Maybe there are only two or three good names for that. I’m not telling you now just yet… wait until the December solstice 2017.

I didn’t mean to cause anyone distress. I just went in search of a way of moving beyond Language to translinguistic knowledge, and found that I’d have to move the goalposts to metalanguage. Just a cowboy who wanted to come home from the range, but found myself riding into an unexplored terrain.

Good thing I was born on the day of “Moxie”, since I’m essentially asking the entire world to change its fundamental relationship to both language and subtle energy, and to grok the linkage between the two, or risk the possibility of languishing in continued use of ruined speech devoid of the ability to inspire the same sense of sacredness it used to. I imagine I will be needing all the Moxie I can muster in the years ahead to ride this project out.

Buddha? Emptiness? Nirvana? Satori? Shunyata? Nothingness? Nil? Zen? Zero? Oh dear, even the Buddhists need to use language to point out nothing. But they’ll probably be the least upset when language is spoiled. They shouldn’t be though.

And how do you pronounce Jesus? Like the Hebrews as YESHUA? Like the English as GEEZUZ? Or like the Spanish with HESOOS? You’ll have to figure this out on your own. I won’t get to giving a full discussion of the Divine Names in the Lingua-U project for another couple of years.

And God help us, what will we name the CHILDREN in a world when every phoneme holds a metalinguistic sacred importance? You may know what the etymology of your name is, but do you know its metalinguistic sound-meaning, the story of its unfolding in U___?

You can’t avoid these issues if you care a whit about spiritualilty or religion or philosophy, you can only return in willful ignorance to a forgetfulness about subtle energetics of language, a time before metalanguage came to town. Good luck with that.

Some people say they want “spirituality”, but I think that something a little different is really going on. Their sense of Self (𝌢) at the Seat of Structure at the Letter of Self-Sensing (⚍⚊) is lacking in Spirit (𝌡)at the Seat of Basis at the Letter of Self-Sensing. Spirit (𝌡) so is the Yang to the Yin of Self (𝌢), for these words are identical in three of the first four marks of subtle energy, parting at the fourth mark, the Mark of Quadrant, as Spirit sizes up the Individual Objective Quadrant and Seat supplies the Individual Subjective Quadrant at Station Four with their essential impetus. Spirit opposes and complements the Self at the Yin Master of the Seat of Structure, Sexuality; Sameness completes and reinforces the Self when it encompasses both Spirit and Sapience, the Incipient Knowledge at the Seat of Basis.

Simply expressed, the quest to be “spiritual” is the attempt to strengthen and solidify and support the Self by connecting it to the Yin Master at the Seat of Basis (SP) with its Inner Power (IR) of the Foundation (IT) to Channel (CHU) it to Alphabetical-Alchemical Actualizing (AEL). That is what may be really going on, as it looks from this Kosmic Address at the First Column of the Third Tier. Artifacts such as Serenity and Satori and Salvation and Solemnity and Soulfulness are all closely related to the spiritual life, but they are not the ends, only waystations of Station Four in the Yang movement of its rising up in the first two weeks of the Month of the Golden Egg.

Christianity teaches that the essential human drama is the movement from Sin to Salvation of the Soul by embracing God through Christ. These facts of Christian theology too are expressions of the first two weeks of the Month of the Golden Egg: Sin at the Yin-Yun position of the Seat of Interiority (𝌡𝌃) requires the purifying Soap / Sofia (a.k.a. Holy Spirit) at the Seat of Motion (𝌢𝌁) to repair the temporary Separation (𝌢⚌) necessary for Sexuality (𝌢⚎) … and thus prepare to set the Soul (𝌢𝌅) away from Sadness / Evil / Samsara (𝌣⚌, 𝌣⚎, 𝌣𝌘) to Salvation (𝌣𝌟). Sofia, the Yin expression of Spirit, reemerges covertly as sacred Sound (𝌣𝌃), Yin to the Yang of Salvation, in the final act of the Letter of Self-Sensing. In Christianity, the Holy Spirit alone is capable of bringing Salvation because there is not only one spirit, but many, and that spirit which is most in-Ch’i’d (subtle energetically full) at Wholeness is the Holy Spirit.

All of this is not merely one person’s opinion, but the facts relevant to the topic as first disclosed at Station Seven in Lingua-U, the Integral Konstruct which brings together the Sacred Word traditions of the globe into a New Harmony.

I got asked that question today. There’s a long answer with twists and turns in my autobiography, and it’s wrapped up in stories regarding my progression as a mystic within the Abrahamic Traditions and as an Integral thinker concerned with LGBT liberation, and as a poet frustrated with my endeavor to create an Epic Poem of Consciousness, and many other things. But that’s not necessary to go into today. Simply put, I developed a new magical system because I had to … to be whole. I had discovered that linguistic and numerological synchronicities were everywhere overlooked or misunderstood, and they were all pointing to something … but what? And of what significance were they? No other school of magic that I knew of had cracked the code on it. I found books on these topics and didn’t see anyone else who had tried to put the synchronicities together like I saw was necessary.

There were bits and pieces that were useful, but mostly I got the impression that magical systems were not really informed by a sophisticated philosophy of language. In fact, the esotericists I found were ignorant of the power of the linguistic synchronicities, even the ones who seemed like they ought to know better (e.g., Aleister Crowley). So I needed to come up with a new way of looking at language that was (a) Integrally informed — so it would fit as a puzzle piece within a holistic vision of human nature and potential, and didn’t pretend to actually be That Whole Picture, and (b) tapped into the magical power of linguistic iconism in a scientifically respectable and yet cutting-edge speculative way — because scientists were loathe to step beyond their objective perch and couldn’t be relied upon to sign on to a “magical agenda”, yet they shouldn’t be ignored, either.

There were aspects of magic that I didn’t find very intriguing philosophically, so I left those to the side. In my own version of Hogwarts, I put off taking classes in ritual magic, potions, and dark arts / defense against such for later. I found divination to be the most interesting subject, because I actually found that a good deal of it worked for me “magically” and I wanted to better understand how that could be so. It frustrated me that there were many divination systems, but they didn’t work together, and symbolically they were a hodgepodge of ideas rather than a rational approach to knowledge. These divination systems seldom agreed with each other, and the deeper you got into examining the “guts” of their symbolic edifices, the more you realized that there was a lot of divergence, one system from the next. And then, by chance or angelic guidance, depending on your point of view, I found the Tai Hsuan Ching (Yang Hsiung’s Canon of Supreme Mystery), the so-called “alternative I Ching”. Hsiung had built an epic poem, philosophical system that reconciled Taoism and Confucianism and other schools, a divination system, and a magical calendar. This magical system was the first time I saw something that had the potential to be a genuine Symbol of Everything — a single way of viewing the Kosmos that could unite language, sacred space, and sacred time. And yet the THC was completely overlooked and neglected, all but forgotten in China and seldom mentioned even among esotericists. It was an enigma.

As an integral Christian, I was also intrigued by the possibility that the THC could reconcile East and West in a way way that had never before been done: by aligning symbolic systems of subtle energies conceived in a ternary fashion. If the THC worked, it could “prove” through “magical means” the reality of the Trinity, all the while confirming mystical insights based on the number 3 in other religions as well, such as the Trimurti and Tridevi and the Gunas of Hinduism. I looked for other wisdom around the THC to see who had thought along similar lines, but the trail was thin. No one I could find had attempted to decipher and explicate the THC in our modern time in a way I found hugely useful, except of course the THC’s translators (who seemed to view it as an intellectual curiosity mainly of interest to historians of Chinese religion). I saw the THC as a potential Philosopher’s Stone, a new edifice for conceiving of magical systems by creating a new Kabbalah of the International Phonetic Alphabet — a metalinguistic tool for aligning the Sacred Words of all the world’s religions together into a single harmony, if it were possible. In this way, post-metaphysics could be grounded not only at the experiential level or cross-paradigmatic level (as Integral philosophers had already done), but at a subtle level as well (which had never been done). If a new metalanguage could be built that were based on subtle energy marks rather than phonemes, it could mark the start of a new era of magic: as subtle (Indigo/Violet) technology for advancing the enterprise of Integral thinking into the Third Tier.

That project excited me, but it was a lonely vision shared by next-to-nobody. So I set about slowly to make the THC into a focal point of my own spiritual and magical and psychic explorations, and to learn how to use it for divination, and to learn how to use it for calendary, and to see how it related to the Integral Map of the Kosmos. After several years of doing this, I discovered that yes my hunch had paid off and yes the THC could indeed become the linchpin of a new form of magic and yes it could even help to bring the Abrahamic Traditions into harmony with “pagan” insights into nature. (The final pentagram of the THC, No. 243, spells “Yahweh” and “Unity” and “Universe” and “Unique”). A magical system that could put the Divine Names into symbolic harmony with Buddha at the Base of Being and Allah/Yahweh at the penultimate station of Unity is a nifty trick/divine miracle.

I had to evolve the THC for a variety of reasons, and I wrote new descriptions of all of its stations and started to play around with them. I rebranded the linguistic edifice I built on the THC as Lingua-U and the sacred calendar as The Kalendar. I wrote a book of speculative fiction and epic poetry surrounding Station One, the station most closely aligned with magic, traditionally … and saw this book published by Tangent Publishers/Integral Publishers in 2016. I wrote most of a book called Lingua-U which will establish the definitions for the magical system in a Big Picture (the book is on its way, probably within just a few months). I started publishing a daily blog on The Kalendar to start to show the way that language works when it is viewed from the metalanguage, as a new form of story or fable for enacting the Integral Konstruct. I have coined the term Integral Magic as the working title for the whole cosmos of ideas that the THC inspires in me from the metalanguage and calendar to a new Tarot and new Zodiac and new sacred atlas. I didn’t find the old magic very useful for my purposes because no one had worked out the language problem in as compelling and comprehensive a fashion as I believe Integral Magic does, all the while integrating it into the Integral World Philosophy as a valuable addition, for folks who are ready for it.

Was it really necessary to scrap the old magical systems and start a fresh? It was, for me. Everything had to be brought crashing down so I could see the new terrain with beginner’s eyes, and begin to erect something fresh and powerful. In the process, I’ve started to see why … on a philosophical and existential level … it was necessary to “burn the old ways to the ground”, to to speak … and I’ve started to develop new stories and fables around it (see my sci-fi/fantasy story for the start of it). Basically, we live in a world that is evolving beyond dualisms of Yin/Yang into a postdualistic, ternary reality of Yang/Yin/Yung. Binary code of 0s and 1s is being replaced by ternary code of 0s, 1s, and 2s. This is the subtle crisis of our time, focused as it was at 2,000 CE, when the Yin/Yang system symbolically entered its deathbed. We are now living at a time of crisis which can only be resolved, at a subtle level, through a new system that will ultimately create new languages, new worldviews, and new religious movements/spiritualities/metareligions. At a time of crisis, you don’t pour new wine into old wineskins. You make sure you’ve got a rock-solid foundation at the source code. That’s what I’m passionately committed to evolving.